Tag: LinkedIn

This past week, Facebook and LinkedIn both revealed new numbers and stats about holiday shopping, even though Halloween is just a day away.Here are six data points that stuck out to us this week.1.

Tis the seasonIt’s still October, but the holiday season is already in full swing for retailers and consumers are expected to spend 51 percent of their shopping budgets online this year, according to data from Deloitte.

Secret job huntersSince launching a feature called Open Candidates a year ago, LinkedIn says that it is now used by 10 million users.The feature lets users privately let recruiters know that they are open to new opportunities without broadcasting it to their network.LinkedIn also plans to add more personalized suggestions…

Pivot to … pictures?Arkadium, a content tool that helps publishers like CNN and the Washington Post boost engagement on stories, found that 85 percent of millennials were likely to finish reading a story if it included visuals.

Another 82 percent of millennials said they would return to news sites that regularly include visuals.So, why are millennials memorized by images?

And while many of the tech giants working on AI like Google and Facebook have open sourced some of their algorithms, they hold back most of their data.In contrast, blockchains represent and even incent open data.

For example: creating a decentralized Uber requires a relatively open dataset of riders and drivers available to coordinate the network.The network effects and economic incentives around these open systems and their data can be more powerful than current centralized companies because they are open standards that anyone can build on in the same way the protocols of the internet like TCP/IP, HTML, and SMTP have achieved far greater scale than any company that sits atop them.

And oracle systems (a fancy way of saying getting people all over the world to report real world information to the blockchain in a way we can trust) like Augur will inject more data.This open data has the potential to commoditize the data silos most tech companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, and Amazon are built on and extract rent from.

AIs trained on open data are more likely to be neutral and trustworthy instead of biased by the interests of the corporation who created and trained them.Since blockchains allow us to explicitly program incentive structures, they may make the incentives of AI more transparent.Simplified, AI is driven by 3 things: tools, compute power, and training data.

My guess is they shift to 1) creating blockchain protocols and their native tokens and 2) AIs that leverage the open, global data layer of the blockchain.

‘There’s an urgency to ensure that AI benefits society and minimises harm,’ said LinkedIn founder Hoffman.

LinkedIn and eBay founders Reid Hoffman and Pierre Omidyar donate $10m each to the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund

The fund is one of many new bodies aimed at shaping the future of AI in a positive – or, at least, thoughtful – direction.

The founders of LinkedIn and eBay are donating a combined $20m (£16.4m) to fund academic research aimed at ensuring the safety of artificial intelligences.

LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman and the Omidyar network, the philanthropic investment firm set up by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, are donating $10m each to the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, which will distribute money to researchers working on the tough ethical problems raised by AI.